–Duncan Mclaren has expanded his discussion of Waugh’s school teaching career at Aston Clinton based on his newly available materials. The discussion has been posted on Duncan’s website. Here is an excerpt from the introduction to give you some idea of what he has added:
…On the face of it, the Welsh School, was uppermost in his mind. The physical layout of Llanabba Castle owes much to Arnold House, Denbighshire. Also, Mrs Roberts pub, where Paul Pennyfeather spent much of his non-teaching time, is an actual pub that can still be found in the streets of Llanddullas, and I drank there myself in 2011 in the footsteps of Evelyn Waugh circa 1925. Also, the extraordinary character Grimes is based entirely on a man called Young, who arrived at Arnold House at the beginning of Waugh’s second term there.
However, I hope to show that Waugh’s four terms at Aston Clinton were also important to the art of Decline and Fall. During School sports day, the arrival in a limousine of Margot Beste-Chetwynde was based on something that happened at Aston Clinton, located as it is between London and Oxford. Such exotic visitors were simply not going to turn up when Evelyn was exiled to the middle of nowhere, as Evelyn would have thought of his Welsh existence.
The photo album newly made available by Pat Grinling’s son and Sue Willis, nearly 100 years after it was put together, is going to be integral to my attempts to show how teaching at Aston Clinton contributed to Waugh’s artistry. The good news for you, dear reader, is that you don’t need to buy into my thesis. There is every chance that you will be just as intrigued and enchanted as I have been by the Pat Grinling photographs and the way they complement Evelyn Waugh’s vivid and outrageous diary entries of the time…
Here is a link to the additional material which includes at least one newly identified photograph of Evelyn Waugh. Many thanks again to Duncan for passing this along.
–The New Statesman has published a review of a new book entitled Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite. The book is by Sam Friedman and Aaron Reeves and is reviewed by Nicholas Harris. It follows the lives of Francis Charteris and his descendants and is intended to illustrate the adaptation and survival of the British upper class. Here’s the conclusion of the review:
…The public schools and establishment universities might still be producing this elite, but only because they’ve adapted to the new age. Eton Rifles is out, replaced by advanced Stem and kindergarten computer science. And it’s fitting that elite British education is an export industry now, subsidised in particular by the scions of an East Asian super-rich. What they aim to produce is not so much a domestic ruling class but an international elite, fit to fill the rosters of global business. Any descendant of Francis Charteris might pass through the same institutional furnaces as their ancestor, but they’d be smelted and beaten into a very different alloy. These levelling trends are only set to continue. Most people admitted to Who’s Who are around 50. Who knows what the fintech elite of 2054 will list as their hobbies: Peloton and IQ testing?
Thanks to the propaganda of the period drama, our vision of our upper class is hopelessly anachronistic. The general public remains more familiar with marquises and under-butlers than it is with consultancy or corporate law. Amid such misconceptions, Born to Rule is an important attempt to take the measure of our new and evolved elite and… provides much-needed academic clarity.
Class has now returned to British politics, but class war is very difficult to wage…The modern elite doesn’t exhibit itself with old boys’ ties, let alone horse and carriage. It Ubers about London open-necked, free from political identification or scrutiny.
In Friedman and Reeves’s conclusion, they suggest several admirable policy decisions to loosen the stranglehold they identify. One (applying VAT to private-school fees) featured in Labour’s first King’s Speech. Others – reforming council tax, raising a wealth tax, a cap on private-school students attending Russell Group universities – likely exceed the political capital of this government. But beyond public policy, the achievement of this fascinating book should be to spark a broader reconsideration of our new ruling caste: no longer the seigneurial elite so beloved of Evelyn Waugh, but a successor class to Tom Wolfe’s “masters of the universe”.
I am not sure it is quite fair to say the the upper class were “beloved” by Waugh. Like Tom Wolfe did for his generation’s “masters of the universe”, Waugh satirized the upper classes as he knew them and was probably grateful to them for the material they provided him to inspire his writing.
–Several fashion websites have cited Waugh’s writings as an inspiration for a new men’s clothing line designed by Hedi Slimane. Here is a sample of the description:
There has been much talk about the return of Cool Britannia in recent months, between the Saltburn phenomenon and the Oasis reunion – but it was another aspect of English aesthetics that Hedi Slimane had in mind when he signed, filmed, and produced the new Celine SS25 collection, whose video-show was unexpectedly presented yesterday afternoon under the title The Bright Young. A single glance at college-style jackets, 1920s straw hats, and glimpses of young people lounging among green fields or rowing on a pond takes us back to Brideshead Revisited, a classic by Evelyn Waugh and one of the cornerstones of the most aristocratic queer English prose after that of Oscar Wilde. It is to Waugh, but to the book Vile Bodies, a kind of satire of the hedonistic England of the 1920s, that the epigraph accompanying the collection belongs. And Slimane has followed the self-imposed theme thoroughly: in the avenues of the stunning Holkham Hall in Norfolk, slender, very young dandy figures move as if they have just come from Eton with their uniforms still on, taking refuge in their family’s noble villa in a burst of high society signifiers, including heraldic crests. (Emphasis in original)
This is excerpted from a posting on NSS Magazine which is available here.
–The religious website WordsOnFire.com has a brief review by Dr Christopher Kaczor highly recommending Brideshead Revisited. After a brief description of the plot, the review concludes:
…These marital and familial conflicts come to a surprising conclusion at the culmination of the novel. More than one character is caught with “an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.” I won’t spoil the ending. But have Kleenex handy.
